ABSTRACT
Recent financial history can be interpreted as a spiral of financial and economic crises and a set of regulatory responses to them. Over the past few decades this process has shown that the global financial system is adept at establishing alternative legal and quasi-legal spaces that circumvent national systems of taxation and financial regulation. About half of the global stock of money is routed through ‘offshore’ financial centres (OFCs), many of which are considered to be tax havens. The vast majority of wholesale banking takes place in unique quasi-legal spaces of the Euromarket and its various descendants. More recently, the global financial crisis of 2007–09 has revealed the scale of the phenomenon of ‘shadow banking’ (SB), or a complex network of financial intermediation that takes place outside the balance sheets of the regulated banks, and thus remains invisible to the regulatory bodies.
